Skip to main content
TrustRadius
Azure Virtual Machines

Azure Virtual Machines

Overview

What is Azure Virtual Machines?

Virtual Machines (VMs) are available on Microsoft Azure, providing what is built as a low-cost, per-second compute service, available via Windows or Linux.

Read more
Recent Reviews

Let's talk about VMs

6 out of 10
April 05, 2022
Incentivized
We use Azure VMs for 2 main reasons. The first one, is when we need to do a lift&shift from on-prem to the cloud, where the main purpose …
Continue reading

Databricks on Azure VMs

7 out of 10
April 05, 2022
I used Azure Virtual Machines in my last organization for deploying out Machine Learning model and related workloads on virtual machines. …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 5 features
  • Virtual machine automated provisioning (23)
    9.0
    90%
  • Live virtual machine backup (19)
    9.0
    90%
  • Live virtual machine migration (16)
    8.5
    85%
  • Management console (21)
    8.0
    80%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

View all pros & cons
Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing

3 Year Reserved - Burstable VMs - B1S

$0.0038

Cloud
Per Hour

Spot - General Purpose - Av2

$0.005

Cloud
Per Hour

1 Year Reserved - Burstable VMs - B1S

$0.0059

Cloud
Per Hour

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Return to navigation

Features

Server Virtualization

Server virtualization allows multiple operating systems to be run completely independently on a single server

8.6
Avg 8.3
Return to navigation

Product Details

What is Azure Virtual Machines?

Azure Virtual Machines Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Virtual Machines (VMs) are available on Microsoft Azure, providing what is built as a low-cost, per-second compute service, available via Windows or Linux.

Reviewers rate Virtual machine automated provisioning and Live virtual machine backup highest, with a score of 9.

The most common users of Azure Virtual Machines are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(88)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-23 of 23)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Azure VMs provide us with the flexibility, scalability, and reliability required for cloud management and optimization solutions. We can leverage VMs for various use cases, including application hosting, development and testing, data analysis, disaster recovery, and hybrid cloud deployments. Also one of the major use of of Azure VM is it's highly cost effective than AWS EC2 so it helps us in Cost Management part as well.

  • Scalability & Flexibility
  • Integration with Azure Ecosystem.
  • Provides Wide Range of VM Sizes That helps us in Effective Selection.
  • Azure VM can be improved in There Boot up time.
  • One can expect better cost optimisation.
  • Azure can also improve the UI and Configuration Part setup for VM's
Azure VMs will be best suited in terms of flexibility, scalability, and reliability.
Also for cloud management and optimization solutions one can trust the Azure VM. We can leverage VMs for various use cases, including application hosting, development and testing, data analysis, disaster recovery, and hybrid cloud deployments.
One more thing with Azure Is that they provide a great customer support as well
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Azure Virtual Machines is our first choice when we want to host virtualized Windows servers in the cloud. No other hosting provider provides the excellent level of integration that Microsoft does in their Azure hosting environment. Whether we need to spin up a server for a short period of time, or keep a production critical instance running with minimal failure, we only use Azure Virtual Machines when that server requires Microsoft Windows.
  • Security guidance
  • Integrations with other Azure services
  • Cost management
  • Improve naming and pricing tiers of VM sizes
  • Simplify the user interface
  • Allow configuration mixing and matching rather than VM sizes
If you want to host a dedicated Windows server on the cloud, and especially if you want to integrate it with your on premises Active Directory, Azure Virtual Machines should be your first choice. Obviously running Linux on Azure works very well too, but given Azure's pricing is not the cheapest, there are other providers out there that have a better cost-benefit ratio for Linux. That said, hosting Windows on Azure can be affordable (especially when compared to other providers) if you plan your licensing, topology, and application architecture correctly.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In our business we often have a need for VMs. Sometimes the VM needs to be reliable and always available. Sometimes it needs to be disposable. Sometimes we need to quickly upgrade the VM to respond to the increasing demand for the app running on that VM. All that is a a breeze to handle on Azure Virtual Machines.
  • Scalability
  • Flexibility
  • Reliability
  • Pricing
  • Detailed VM hardware customisation
  • Discounts for long-term use
If you’re looking for a dead cheap VM, Azure Virtual Machines is not for you. However, if you’re looking for a very powerful VM to use short-term, or you need a VM that’s flexible and can be upgraded or downgraded within minutes (and even programmatically) then Azure Virtual Machines is very well suited for that.
April 05, 2022

Let's talk about VMs

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Azure VMs for 2 main reasons. The first one, is when we need to do a lift&shift from on-prem to the cloud, where the main purpose is to migrate a system as-is to the cloud before restructuring it. The second reason, is for specific needs where we can't solely rely on PaaS or SaaS services, and we need to have the flexibility provided by a lower level IaaS VM
  • Many presets are available when spinning up a new instances to match you workload, instead of having to start from scratch
  • VM Scale sets makes it really easy to scale in & out the VMs easily
  • When getting started, no need to manage a networking layer before starting a new instance, no need for any VPC complexitites, as Azure handles it.
  • VM Firewall and security rules can be managed directly from the Azure interface
  • Slightly more expensive that other cloud provider VMs
  • The spin up time is a little longer as well. Even a few seconds count when you need to scale up quickly
  • Lacking choices when choosing Linux based OS images
We tend to use as much App Services, and Serverless as we can. But what those win in ease of use and efficiency, they lack in flexibility. Many workloads cannot run on those services. Especially when you need heavy and time-consuming computing. Azure Virtual Machines on the other hand, give you anything you need in terms of flexibility, since you have access to the underlying OS, and for the fraction of the price. But as always, it's a tradoff, since you also need to manage, reboot, maintain, and patch those VMs
Karan Dua | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I used Azure Virtual Machines in my last organization for deploying out Machine Learning model and related workloads on virtual machines. Our requirement was to enable automated deployment of our compute engine - Databricks, our ML models, and Airflow workflows on scalable virtual machines and Azure Virtual Machines was our choice in the last organization I worked with.
  • Rapid Scalability
  • Variety of elastic storage options
  • Flexibility and control for app deployment
  • Regular Updates for security and feature upgrades
  • Fault tolerance
  • Native Integration with Databricks
  • Pricing can be a bit better
  • Compute types can be increased (AWS EC2 has more)
  • No Bare metal GPU instances as in OCI
The VM deployment process is really simple in Azure Virtual Machines. But as I said earlier, compute types were a bit limited when I used it. In a few scenarios we had requirements for a Bare Metal GPU instance for high performance compute, but it wasn't available, so we had to look for alternatives.
David Ngo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We have a small cloud footprint and we use it more to test specific applications and how they behave off-premise.
  • Ease of use.
  • Relatively fast deployment.
  • Tons of features we can take advantage of in Azure.
My experience has been positive so far. There is so much documentation online that I have yet to run into any real issues that were not self-produced. You should understand what workloads are suitable to run in the cloud before migrating your entire datacenter. Expect latency and possibly downtime that is out of your control.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Azure VMs to deploy docker containers. They are really easy to get started with and work well with for us as part of a multi-cloud strategy. There are various options available in terms of size and cost to meet the organisation's budget requirements. Microsoft also has some of the best support I've seen with solutions architects sessions through MS for startups.
  • Deploy docker containers in VMs, various OS options available
  • Not sure - they are easy to setup and get going.
We've never used on-premise servers and have a cloud-native business. VMs are fairly straightforward products with a wide range of use cases. Lots of availability zones to increase redundancy and lots of configuration options ie VPCs etc.
Stacey Arjen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Azure Virtual Machines are easy to configure and install and offer highly scalable and flexible possibilities with ready-to-use on-demand resource availability which enables our organization to optimize server and storage utilization capabilities. Easy on report creation and also easy to adjust functions to fit the way we work.
  • Always available and on-demand support.
  • Scalable and flexible product.
  • Easy to configure and install.
  • Customizing advanced setting is not easy to beginners.
  • Moving multiple data is not easy for starters.
  • Feedback collection from many sources is not also easy from the start.
Easy to extend our on-premises workloads to Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines and provides us with on-demand capabilities to storage and a highly flexible and scalable product. A secure product that protects our workloads and has very good controls to access and is cost-effective with the pay-as-you-go billing system and offers ready-to-use storage resources.
Dima Kazavchinsky | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In our company, all of the VM infrastructure used for production and corporate needs is in the Azure cloud and we Use Azure Virtual Machines for all of our needs. The only exception, when we don't use this product in the Azure cloud, is when we use Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets. Azure Virtual Machines come with different hardware configurations and it can suit any need - there are small VMs for testing and DEV and there are very large VMs as well built for higher performance of the production environment.
  • You can login to Azure VMs using SSO with your Azure Ad account
  • Azure VMs are securely accessible from anywhere in the world, with Azure Bastion
  • You can execute scripts on the VM from the Azure portal without logging in to it
  • No hot plug available when increasing VM hardware
  • SSO for Windows WMs is somewhat limited
For those who use the Azure cloud, Azure Virtual Machine is the best option for Compute resources, it provides flexible pricing plans, worldwide availability and almost any scale that you will need without wasting too much time for these resources to become available. In Azure Cloud, serverless Compute is also available, so for specific usecases, this can be used instead of Azure Virtual Machines.
Filip Grasheski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use VMs for many different purposes:
- Isolated development machines for working with Azure cloud services.
- Hosting Jenkins master server used to deploy our Azure-based applications.
- Hosting Jenkins agents for CI/CD pipelines which are built on separate VNETs for dev, test, sim, and prod.
- Azure Data Factory integration runtime to run ADF pipelines.
  • Very easy to spin up.
  • Low amount of maintenance.
  • Low cost when using reserved instances.
  • Flexible in terms of supported OSs.
  • Additional security risk that needs to be managed.
  • Complexity to make replicas of a VM.
  • Potentially build and forget in larger enterprises which will drain money.
Using a self-hosted integration runtime with Azure Data Factory, although only supports Windows, will make it more expensive. Hosting DevOps tools, such as Jenkins, code scanners, etc. can be set up very easily and replicated if needed. Any kind of distributed architecture, like Selenium grid for GUI testing of applications, can be set up very easily because of the myriad of possibilities for OSs.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Capabilities of infrastructure were extended using Azure Virtual Machines.
The business problems the product addresses are many.
Some of them are:
1. Testing the applications on cross platforms. It is basically testing whether the software works in all the operating systems.
2. Automatic allotment of virtual machines based on the traffic encountered.
  • Provisioning
  • Scaling
  • Faster deployment
  • Swapping of OS disks is a bit difficult.
  • More features can be introduced for low size VMs.
Scaling up virtual machines is very easy and can be automated as well. Based on the inbound traffic, the virtual machines get scaled up and down. If the traffic is low, they scale down and if the traffic goes high, they scale up. Eventually, it saves the overall costs.
Umair Mehboob | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Azure Virtual Machines for our core development and production servers and we found Azure Virtual Machines as one of the best cloud virtual machines due to their burst internet bandwidth which provides better accessibility to the services deployed on Azure Virtual Machines. Azure Virtual Machines are the best when coupled with other Azure services.
  • Low pricing.
  • Virtual Machines are very responsive.
  • Compatible with other providers.
  • Deployment process must be easy as compared to other providers.
  • Linux support must be enhanced.
  • Pricing model needs to be more convenient.
Azure Virtual Machines are best suited for internet-hungry applications as it provides great internet bandwidth. We have used it for our .Net development and found the VMs very responsive. Azure Virtual Machines must provide the same internet latency for Linux-based OS. Support for services is very good with the Microsoft OS but Azure Virtual Machines needs to improve the compatibility issues with the Linux OS.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Azure Virtual Machines are convenient, and we have been using them in our production environment. The machines offer a great offer and integration to our existing environment and excellent security features to ensure we handle the vulnerabilities better. I recommend it to everyone who has a current virtualization environment (Vmware or Vsphere) as it will be easy to understand.
  • DR Setup
  • Availability across multiple regions.
  • Network security.
  • API integration for Monitoring.
  • Service Now integration for Asset Management.
  • I believe billing is one region where there is still room for improvement.
  • Also the migration from physical machine is easy on AWS still.
  • I feel there are still issues with running SAP on these hosts.
Azure Virtual Machines are very useful for the environment which has a heavy presence of Virtualisation (VMware and Vsphere) as it is easy to migrate the setups. It is good to explore VDI setups in this environment. It is less suitable for the environment where a lot of physical clusters and servers are present as migration would not be a fun task to do here.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
As a large organization, we use Azure Virtual Machines in multiple projects and for multiple customers. We are a center of excellence team that provides a lot of new product evaluations and for that one of our preferred platforms is Azure Virtual Machines, it's more stable and user-friendly. We also use it internally for different tool deployments.
  • We need to deploy tools in multiple different platforms like Windows and Linux, it gives flexibility and easy deployment with configurations for our testing.
  • Azure monitoring comes with the Azure subscription which helps us to quickly monitor Azure health and also quickly integrates with enterprise solutions.
  • I believe for longer commitments, Azure discounts could have been better.
As a Tool CoE Team, we need to evaluate multiple different tools available in the market and we need to deploy on multiple different platforms like Windows and Linux, It is well suited for these types of scenarios where we can quickly deploy and test the product capabilities. There may be scenarios where Azure Virtual Machines may be less appropriate but I haven’t come across any so far.
Feras Diab, PMP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I am using the virtual machine to host my and my customer's products and custom-made solutions, we are installing some other software on these virtual machines such as databases, web servers, applications servers, scripts, and automation jobs and code. Products vary from web applications SaaS software, backend logic, application programming interface (API), these APIs are built to be consumed from mobile applications. The products and solutions are for different use cases such as CRM, sales force automation, recruitment, hr, e-learning, and e-commerce.
  • Easy management.
  • User friendly.
  • Controlled billing.
  • Access rights and security.
  • Shell
  • Logs
  • Apps templates
It is recommended for quick prototypes and development environments where you need to provision virtual machines quickly and easily, billing and costing have so many options and scenarios where you can choose from. It is sometimes hard to troubleshoot problems occurring for the networking part of the virtual machine where you need to be very careful especially if you are using VPN scenarios.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Azure Virtual Machines serve the use case of when we need virtual machines that are running on the Microsoft Azure Cloud. We are a multi-cloud provider and therefore it's critical for our business value proposition to offer our services on multiple major cloud versions. When you are in the Azure cloud already, Azure Virtual Machines are the only sensible choice of virtual machines.
  • It's relatively easy to set up Azure Virtual Machines within the console.
  • Azure Virtual Machines exist in the Azure ecosystem so you have access to other Azure services.
  • Azure customer support has been responsive to our needs.
  • Pricing can be a concern if you are truly agnostic to which cloud you are building your particular solution in.
  • The UI, as is the case with any cloud provider, is crowded.
  • As with any cloud provider, it can be difficult to tune in exactly the right amount of servers for your needs...you might find yourself under/overprovisioning.
I would recommend Azure Virtual Machines to anyone who has a business case for building their solutions in Azure. There are reasonable arguments to be made in favor of more stateless architectures for certain use cases, but if you are planning to use virtual machines and are in Azure this is your only option. There are different reasons why one might have a business use case for building in Azure. There are various technical reasons for choosing VMs.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Within our organization, we recently embarked on the completion of two large, highly complex technical programs involving the migration of a large number of applications, databases, and other IT services out of an on-premises data center and a Virtual Private Cloud, into Microsoft Azure public cloud. The use of Azure Virtual Machines allows us to host these migrated applications and services within our Azure tenant.
  • Rapid elasticity.
  • Cost effective.
  • High availability.
  • May not always be the most cost-effective option.
  • The costs of higher-spec VMs may be prohibitive in some scenarios.
  • Azure Virtual Machines are IaaS so some management is required. Vendor-managed SaaS may be preferable for certain applications.
Azure Virtual Machines are well suited in scenarios where an organization has a cloud-first IT strategy, which requires applications, databases, and other IT services to be hosted in the Microsoft Azure public cloud. Azure Virtual Machines allow an organization to effectively host their applications while also maintaining control of the platform, for example, server patching and OS version upgrades. There are many different specification options for Azure Virtual Machines which allow the organization to decide on price vs performance.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Azure Virtual Machines to mainly manage our end-user web platform utilizing its web app plans, we also sit VM servers behind this that contain the data for these web services along with some on-prem servers, we have a VPN direct to Azure and some VPNs direct to clients from our Azure services.
  • When demand is high, we scale the service out, eg During a Football Match.
  • When a football match is over and the throughput of data from OPTA drops we save by the service scaling back in.
  • Our App Service Plans along with the Clean C# code are lightening fast giving a good customer experience.
  • When producing the TV Guide information and a program overruns its scheduled time, a client can instantly be updated to the new programming schedule as our change is instant and its in the right place for all the clients to download and adjust their television guides appropriately to send out to the public giving a 24x7 uptime service that is precise and accurate and resilient to outages due to failover zones around the world.
  • Support on VMs doing strange things around NETUSE as a command resulted in constantly being sent over to INDIA where personally I found a real Language Barrier and even after specifically expressing a support service in the UK or the US it did keep finding its way back to a company called MINDTREE, the language barrier was such that after 4 or 5 meetings I was been asked the same questions that I was asked in the initial day 1 meeting and round and round it went, this issue was never resolved, we had to write code and utilize a different workaround to get over having to use the NETUSE command which previous to a VM running Windows server 2019 Datacentre worked fine.
  • Azure Pricing could be more competitive to AWS.
  • Having the ability to control app service plans which at the minute are just something that exists and we are not able to really see what they are doing which becomes an issue when you want to try and bug fix an issue.
It's well suited to delivering information about our sports events as during the events a lot of processing power is needed and instantly becomes available by scaling out when the event is over the service can be scaled right back making massive savings.
We use it for football, horse racing, Olympics games etc, it is also used when things happen in the world like right now there is a lot of concern over the Russia and Ukraine conflict, since the demand for this information is high we instantly scale to meet the demand of our news feed services. I believe up to 90% of the UK's News, sports and media information actually passes through our computer systems, we are a market leading news and information service and Azure Virtual Machines provide us with the reliability that we need so that we can provide a rock solid reliable news and information service to the world.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Azure Virtual Machines to create VMs as we grow and add additionals needs. To support the infra and services, and also for the test environment. It's easy to set up a new VM in a few minutes.
  • Scalaility
  • Change the configuration of all VMs independently.
  • Backup and restoration.
  • Need to be able to create all size of VM, including small size one.
  • If server issues, all VM will have an issue, so if the server is down or slow, all VM will suffer from it.
When you need to have multiple servers for different operations, you don't really "need" to have a different server, you can use Azure Virtual Machine to create multiple servers fit for your specifics needs.
Alexandre Carvalho | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I build backup servers and repositories using the Azure VMs x86 infrastructure to backup clients.
  • Easy and fast to build.
  • A lot of features to manage and expand the VMs.
  • Intuitive UI makes you learn fast.
  • To swap an OS disk has some requirements, so not all disks are available to easily swap.
  • Would be good if the public IP assignments were fixed and would not change over time, by default.
  • Nothing else i can think of.
It is well suited for anyone who needs to run a VM (Windows or Linux). Really quick to deploy and start using it.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As an organization with more than 75 sites across a wide geographic area and the requirement to provide high speed access from each site meant that we had to transition away from a hub and spoke design and provide access to resources from each site. By placing the servers and services in the cloud we are able to provide secure access to our resources in a cost-effective manner.
  • Scalability.
  • Cost management.
  • Power/cost ratios.
  • Remote access and secure control.
  • Clear grouping of resources for each virtual resource.
  • Improving remote automation and access.
Azure Virtual Machines are an excellent resource for organizations needing to provide all the time access to resources with zone and regional resource backups and automatic failover.
The perfect time to look at moving to Azure VMs is about a year before your data center is due for a refresh. Being able to move large capital costs into yearly operational costs while removing the need to maintain your own generators, power supply, fire suppression, backup and data recovery while moving those requirements to Microsoft as part of their service level agreement will help reduce your overall cost of ownership.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Azure VMs were used to demonstrate the potential of cloud servers to our managed IT services clients. We also used them for testing and development in house as an easy way to test applications inside of Azure.
  • Integration with other MS services inside of Azure.
  • Scale to extremely high specifications.
  • Complexity of the overall user inveteracy and multiple options.
  • Reduce the bandwidth costs.
Easy way to utilise development of applications inside of the MS eco-system. Also enables integration into a pre-existing billing structure on Microsoft cloud.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In our organization Azure Virtual Machines is being used to collect data. It is being used across the whole organization and is greatly appreciated by everyone. It addresses business problems like miscommunication and incorrect data. We love using Azure Virtual Machines and will continue to use it throughout our company forever.
  • Testing and developing
  • Maintaining small and medium databases
  • Maintaining low and medium traffic web servers
  • It could have more storage available
  • It could run faster
  • It could have more power
Return to navigation